Convergent Sequences

I'm going to explain the math from last night's calculus class here. It shouldn't be too ridiculously hard to follow, if you're interested. I was impressed by our professor's finding of ways to explain it that made a lot of sense, because this is the kind of thing that, if I were reading it in a textbook, I would balk at.

So, a sequence is just some set of numbers that happen in a particular order, for instance, the Fibonacci sequence:

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, ...

It's not just a set of numbers, because the order matters. The 4th number of the Fibonacci sequence is 3. You could say f(4) = 3 if you wanted to talk about the sequence as a function. You could calculate the nth term of the sequence for any n.

The simple, intuitive definition of what it means for a sequence to "converge" on some value, a, is that, as the sequence goes on, it gets closer and closer to a. But there are a couple of problems that keep this from being a usable definition:

1. Consider a sequence like this:

2, 3/2, 4/3, 5/4, 6/5, 7/6, 8/7, 9/8, 10/9, ...

It seems like it's converging to 1. It's certainly getting closer and closer to 1 as it goes on. But it's also, technically, getting closer and closer to 0. So it's not enough that it gets closer and closer - it also has to get close. This series looks like it's going to get arbitrarily close to 1, which it's not going to do with 0.

2. Consider a sequence like this:

2, 1, -1.9, 1, 1.8, 1, -1.7, 1, 1.6, 1, -1.5, 1, 1.4, 1, -1.3, 1, ...

Again, this sequence is converging to 1, but it doesn't seem like it's getting "closer and closer" to 1. It's oscillating around 1, with the oscillations getting smaller and smaller, but at any given point it might be moving away from 1.

So, let's move towards a more formal definition. If we consider the terms of the sequence as successive approximations of the value to which it is converging, then the question is this - can we get the approximation as good as we want?

That is, for some acceptable level of error (ε), can we find an N such that anything past the Nth term of the sequence is within ε of our value, a? If so, then the series converges to a.

It can't just be proving that some term or other is within ε of a. We might be running a computer program that provides these successive approximations, and we certainly don't want to get a worse estimate if we let the computer run too long.

And we have to be able to do this for any ε someone gives us, as long as it's greater than 0. If you say you want something with 0.00001 of a, I have to be able to say, well, anything past the 2000th value will be that close.

So there you go: convergent sequences with ε (δ comes later).

Pathetic Bear Reenactment

OK, this is really bad. And it only gets worse as it goes on.

The Well-Ordering Principle and the Pop Quiz Paradox

Last night in class, we went over a proof of the Well-Ordering Principle, and tonight, it occurs to me how much that proof reminds me of what was possibly the first inductive "proof" I ever encountered: the pop-quiz paradox.

First, the well-ordering principle. This just states that, if you have a non-empty set of natural numbers, it has a least element. The natural numbers, N, are these ones:

{1, 2, 3, ...}

i.e., the counting numbers.

So if you take any subset of those, it will have a smallest element. Duh, right?

The well-ordering principle is actually equivalent to the principle of mathematical induction, which enables a certain type of proof, which is the type I am going to give of the well-ordering principle, as follows:

Let S be a non-empty subset of the natural numbers.
Assume, for a contradiction, that S has no least element.
Then 1 can't be in S, because otherwise, since 1 is the smallest natural number, it would be the least element of S.
Suppose, for some number k, that all of the numbers {1, 2, 3, ... k} are not in the set.
Then k+1 can't be in the set, or it would be the least element.
Thus, by the principle of mathematical induction, S is empty, a contradiction.

That is what is called a "proof by induction."

Now, the pop quiz paradox:

Let's say a teacher says she is going to give a pop quiz next week. It is impossible for the teacher to give a pop quiz in a specific week without the students' knowing what day it will be on. If she waits until Friday, the students will know it must be on Friday since it hasn't happened yet, so Friday is out. But since Friday is out, Thursday is also out - if she hasn't given it by Thursday, the students will know it must be on Thursday. But if Thursday and Friday are both out, then so is Wednesday, ...

It is worth noting that, while the well-ordering principle is true, it is, empirically speaking, not impossible to give a pop quiz, even with advance notice of the week in which it is to occur.

School Tidbits

Being in school again has made me feel incredibly alive, happy, and full of excitement. It is like the very air bristles with energy around me. It's amazing. I felt that I was a little depressed over the summer, and the change back has confirmed and strengthened that observation.

I got my first linear algebra assignment done Friday night; it was pretty straightforward. This morning (Saturday), I got my calculus assignment done. These are due Thursday and Wednesday, respectively.

I wanted to put more effort into calculus because the class kind of scares me and this week a lot of axioms and properties of inequalities and absolute values were floating around, so, after I finished the part of the assignment that isn't to be turned in, I wrote up the axioms he gave us for inequalities, and then each theorem he listed, and I proved each theorem according to the axioms. They weren't difficult proofs at all, but I feel much better having done them.

Later, Ed and I talked fairly extensively about the axioms and theorems. Dr. P hadn't given the axioms very rigorously and we discussed things like whether an "or" in a certain place was exclusive or not, and what the consequences of making either choice would be, and how things would change if we left out or changed other elements of the system. That was crazily fun and also, I think, productive.

(One of the theorems I proved is that 1 > 0. What a relief.)

Anyway, it's amazing to feel this way again. Even though I'm a bit more tired because of going to school four nights a week, I think I am overall much more energetic as a result of being engaged and unbored, which trumps a little extra time away from home every night.

Whoosh!

A Bit More About Liking Math

I should clarify my previous post thusly:

1. I do find the material of math interesting. Unlike psychology or economics, I'm not usually actually curious about math. I certainly don't feel curious about unresolved problems in math. But once I see what's there, I do tend to really enjoy it. So in terms of interest, math is maybe like art for me. I'm not actually curious to see new art, but if I find myself in a gallery I will often super enjoy what I find there.

2. Is math a relative weakness for me? My best guess is that it's somewhere in the middle of my talents. But it may be only that I have gotten far enough in math to see my own limitations, while only skimming the surface of other subjects. It may be that I only imagine that I would kick more ass in some other field. I find that quite plausible. Also, of course, the nature of math is such that it's somewhat objective whether you're succeeding or failing. I might be able to wrongly believe that my essay on Macbeth is a work of genius, but a proof either works or it doesn't.

3. Do I prefer subjects I fear failing at? Perhaps not. I think it's more likely that my disinclination to work means that I'm more likely to work hard if I'm moderately afraid than if I'm pretty confident, and of course, as I've mentioned before, more work = more enjoyment, at least for me. (Is this true for other people? Do you prefer a difficult 2-hour hike to an easy one, after it's all over?) There is also kind of no superficial level of math. You can read a book like How the Mind Works and feel like you have a grasp of cognitive psychology, but even the equivalent lay math book will require work and thought to grasp (again, at least for me). You either work hard and get something out of it or you don't and...don't.

So I guess what I'm saying is, contra modern wisdom, all-or-nothing thinking and a slight lack of self-efficacy are drivers of my math success.

Fear of Failure

I often talk about liking math, but what is more true is that math keeps me energized and excited to keep pursuing it. And I think part of the reason for that is that, with math I have a genuine fear of failure.

I was sitting in my calculus class last night feeling a familiar mixture of slight despair and worry over the material. It's not that it's hard, exactly. It just suggests that horrible things are coming down the pike, for which I will need the slightly scary stuff I'm working on right now. Am I smart enough for this class?

I mean, yes, I am. I must be. I am almost certainly above average in my class, likely in the top quarter. If most people are going to pass this class then I can do well in it.

That's what logic tells me, but it's not how I feel.

If I were taking a 400-level English class, there would be no doubt in my mind that if I put in a reasonable amount of effort, I would absolutely kill it. Ditto History, or any other subject that relies on knowledge, reading, and the manipulation of ideas. And I think that feeling of certainty - the very strong linkage between work and outcome - tends to make me a bit lax and uninterested.

Obviously I am also unmotivated by feeling that no effort of mine can make a difference. Set me at the start of a marathon and you won't see me trying. But I think the thrill and fear of not knowing whether I can do math (whatever math is before me) keeps me going, keeps me trying, keeps me signing up for more courses.

This explains why I'm majoring in something that isn't, honestly, a great strength for me.

First Day(s) of School

This semester, I have two 4-credit-hour classes, and they take place on different nights. My schedule is

M/W	7:00-8:50pm	Advanced Calculus I
T/R	7:00-8:50pm	Linear Algebra

It's inconvenient to have to travel to campus four times a week, but nice to only have two hours of class when I go (thus no temptation to skip the second class). And I initially thought the late hours would suck, but I've changed my work schedule so that I work 9:30-6:30 and just shifted my whole day later.

This also means I get up after Ed has left for work, and get home around his bedtime, so most of my time at home during the week will be alone. It's only been two days, but I've basically enjoyed it so far. I'm sure I'll enjoy seeing him on the weekends.

Anyway, I have been to both classes, so here are my thoughts so far.

Linear Algebra

The professor was friendly, very casually dressed, and just slightly spacy. I feel a little concerned that she won't make the class theoretical/"proofy" enough, but by the end of class I thought that she would. At some point, I wrote, on the edge of my paper that I save for comments, "Please go into the algebra of this," because one of the errors I made last time I did this was to focus too much on the algorithms of manipulating matrices and not enough on the underlying algebra. Immediately once I had written it she went into a long bit about the algebra of what we were doing. Nice.

This class is in the building right next to where I usually park, so that's convenient, but it's in an uncomfortable classroom - crowded, noisy, and with the one-piece desks that I don't like. So it is not a very desirable place to be for two hours.

We'll have two tests, a final, homework, quizzes, and class participation. She takes attendance and apparently cares if you show up. She also said there would be a lot of working together in groups, which I utterly dread, because (a) yuck, groups, ugh, but also (b) trying to move desks around in a totally packed classroom of one-piece desks sucks.

So I guess I'm giving this class mixed reviews so far. We have homework due next week that is almost all from the high-numbered problems in the textbook, so that's good.

Advanced Calculus I

If you're wondering what this class is, it is sometimes also called "Real Analysis" (which is to say, analysis of the real numbers, not real as in genuine). You could also say it is the "continuous math" to go along with my "discrete math" from a few semesters ago.

The professor is a slight, unassuming Brit with the obligatory charming accent. He told us that this is the hardest class in undergrad, but also the best, and assured us that it does not exist solely in order to keep you from getting into graduate school.

He also said the class is about three things:

• The nature of the reals and their relationship to the rationals
• ε's and δ's and proofs of everything in calculus
• 19th century mathematics

Apparently the calculus we've already learned is 17th and 18th century mathematics, and now it's time to move into the 19th century, when various unresolved issues (like Fourier series) pushed the mathematicians of the day towards an axiomization of calculus.

I'm enjoying this class so far. I spent an hour last night working on our first homework, which was reasonably challenging and fun. One of the problems we had was several statements that we had to negate - math equivalents of things like

For every cat, there is at least one dog over the age of 7 who has chased that cat.

and more complicated ones like

There is some baby such that every woman in this household who is over 30 and of sound mind has diapered that baby.

I had fun writing the negations of them, though I also felt doubt as to whether I chose the most elegant or direct methods of doing so.

The class is also held in a classroom with long tables and regular rolling-type desk chairs, so it's very comfortable to be in for two hours.

We'll be having three exams plus a final, homework counts as 30% of the grade, and there is no paper, project, or threat of group work.

So that's how my semester looks so far.

Review of "In Defense of Food"

I'm currently reading Michael Pollan's book In Defense of Food. Pollan is the guy who wrote The Omnivore's Dilemma (and some other books, of course) and he is basically a proponent of what you might call natural eating - eating regular food-type food that isn't too processed or industrial.

I haven't read any of his other stuff, but I'm really enjoying this book. Even though I haven't learned that much actually new material from it, he does give a different perspective, and the way he writes about food is motivational for me.

One thing he opposes is what he calls "nutritionism" - that is, the culturally prevalent practice of talking about foods as though they are just collections of chemicals that have nutritional consequences. An example he brings up is a government panel or committee of some kind in 1977 that was looking at heart disease, and decided to recommend that Americans eat less dairy and meat, since it was pretty clearly associated with increased risk of heart disease. Of course, the dairy and meat industries freaked the fuck out, and the recommendations were changed to, basically, "avoid saturated fat," even though there wasn't good evidence that saturated fat was the problematic aspect of meat and dairy. But by focusing on invisible chemical aspects of foods rather than on foods themselves, the government could make dietary recommendations without earning the wrath of any particular food industries.

The growth of nutritionism has also, in Pollan's view, fostered the industrial approach to food that has our grocery stores full of boxes and bags. Once it's discovered that antioxidants, or fiber, or Omega-3 acids are healthy, then they can be added to cereals, breads, pasta, yogurts, cookies, and all the other foods that industry churns out for us. A recommendation like "eat more fruit" or "hey how about some green veggies" doesn't foster the same kind of innovation in new products. (And in case it's not obvious, it's a lot easier to make big profits on something like cookies than on something like eggplants.)

He delves into quite a bit of nutrition science himself, a contradiction that he acknowledges. But it's not that he rejects science, including nutritional science, as our best tool to understanding what makes some foods healthier than others. What he rejects is using today's limited science to decide what to eat based on a nutritional perspective. (He's also in favor of the idea that people can suffer from "orthorexia," or an obsession with the healthfulness of foods.)

What's clear to Pollan is that the basic culprit behind the diseases of affluence (obesity, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, etc.) is (besides the small contributing factor of longevity) basically the Western Diet itself. Whenever people living on any kind of traditional diet (of which there are quite diverse kinds in the world) change over to a Western diet they get fat and diabetic and all the rest of it.

So his basic advice is, don't eat the Western diet. He begins the book with the (familiar) advice: "Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much." The last third (perhaps) of the book is devoted to ideas about how to do this - what he calls "algorithms" and I would call "heuristics." He talks about each part separately - what is "food" (vs. a "foodlike product")? What kind of plants are best to eat (lots of variety; more leaves than seeds)? And what kind of cultures of eating should we follow in order to make food healthy as well as emotionally and socially satisfying?

If I lived fully in accordance with my most basic feelings, I would eat like most of my dad's side of the family eats - a lot of fried chicken and other fast food, chain restaurant fare, the occasional home-cooked spaghetti or hamburger. Most of the other side of my family eat a pretty impressive diet of vegetarian (or near-vegetarian), fresh, from-scratch, vegetable-heavy foods - to such an extent that, while I admire it, it's also hard for me to understand how they can do it. And, of course, my dad's side of my family is markedly more obese and has vastly more health problems than my mom's side.

(My Aunt - my mom's sister - tells a story about when I was little. I visited her during the summer, and she had made some beautiful fresh gazpacho from things she had grown in her own garden. When I went home, I told my mom, "...and all we had to eat was frozen tomato soup!" What's funny to me about the story, and about my Aunt's telling it, is that I would feel exactly the same way now if someone served me gazpacho as a meal.)

So I am kind of trying to use education and knowledge to move myself from my western-diet nature (which has me end up like my dad's family) to a diet more like that of my mom's family (which will help me live longer and in better health). I mean, to be clear, I don't think the difference between the two sides of my family is innate - like genetic or whatever. But growing up as I did, in this place and time, what I want is "the good stuff" - the more fried, refined, salted, sweetened, and processed the better.

So I think Michael Pollan's basis thesis is right, and I am finding the book reasonably motivational. (Some of his stuff also reminded me of Sally's hypothetical Navajo talk about eating.) I recommend reading it, and it also makes a very good companion (obviously up the same alley, yet without much overlap) to The End of Overeating.

Why I (Sometimes) Choose Organic

Yesterday, the friends we have over every other weekend asked me something like, "Why are you obsessed with organic?" They've noticed that the snacks I bring out when they come over tend to be organic rather than conventional junk food, which is always a bit odd (is it really healthier to eat a Newman-O rather than an Oreo?) And Ed chimed in to point out that I drink organic milk.

The vast majority of the food I eat is not organic, especially because I eat quite a lot of restaurant food, but I do choose organic foods relatively often.

With regards to agriculture and sustainability, I don't know what the answer is. I know that eating less meat, especially less beef, is the biggest step you can take towards lowering the environmental footprint of what you eat. Both conventional crops - which require vast amount of petroleum and other limited resources to produce - and organic crops - which require more land per unit of production - have sustainability problems. I think in general this aspect tips towards organic only because the people who buy organic tend to be more environmentally minded and are thus working on and paying attention to these issues. (I also don't think there is any risk that suddenly all of America is going to eat mostly organic foods and thus we'll have to convert a lot more land to growing crops.)

All things being equal, I would rather not eat pesticide, herbicide, etc., residue. I think the amount of that stuff in our food is actually very small and quite safe, but I admit that the idea of not having it on my food does appeal to me.

I often choose organic (or organic-related) dairy and eggs because those practices tend to be associated with less animal cruelty. But again, most of the dairy and egg products I eat are from restaurants, where I exercise no control over how the animals are treated.

Although I haven't proceeded very far in this direction, I am trying to trend towards eating more natural, whole foods. I would like to cultivate in myself the idea that eating a bag full of cheap corn derivatives and chemicals (e.g., oreos) is unappealing. I'd also like to feel that a hyperpalatable, overly-engineered food like southwestern egg rolls from Chili's is gross rather than delicious. Because people who hold these values often choose organic foods, organic prepared or semi-prepared foods tend to reflect these values. So even though I doubt Newman-O's are actually healthier than Oreos, if you read the ingredients you will find mostly things you would cook with yourself. Here, in fact, are the ingredients for Newman-O's:

Organic Unbleached Flour, Organic Sugar, Powdered Sugar, Organic Palm Oil, Canola Oil (Expeller Pressed), Organic Cocoa, Cocoa (Processed with Alkali), Organic Unsweetened Chocolate, Natural Flavor, Salt, Sodium Bicarbonate, Soy Lecithin, (an Emulsifier)

and for Oreos:

Sugar, Enriched Flour, High Oleic Canola Oil and/or Palm Oil and/or Canola Oil and/or Soybean Oil, Cocoa (Processed with Alkali), High Fructose Corn Syrup, Cornstarch, Leavening (Baking Soda and/or Calcium Phosphate), Salt, Soy Lecithin (Emulsifier), Vanillin - An Artificial Flavor, Chocolate

Those are not actually as different as I'd anticipated, but this trend does exist in general.

I want to eat things that are more like things you would make and less like things invented in a factory, and I find that choosing organic encourages me to develop that aesthetic.

So, in short, my reasons for choosing organic are mostly these:

• reduced animal cruelty
• not eating pesticide residue
• possible long-term land use, sustainability, and environmental benefits
• encouraging in myself a preference for natural, whole foods

Fewer Rights?

Over at the Atlantic, David Indiviglio is arguing that credit card companies are responding to a new law intended to increase debtors' rights by actually removing one of those rights:

The New York Times reports one of the early casualties of Congress' recent credit card "bill of rights" legislation. A few prominent credit card companies are actually taking a right away from many in response to the new regulation: the right to exceed your credit limit.

...

How did [Discover and American Express] do it? Easy. They eliminated their cardholders' ability to purchase anything that would put them over their credit limit, unless the companies allow them to do so for no additional fee. After all, those who cannot breach their limit will never need to pay the fee.

Basically, the law apparently says that credit card companies can't charge you a fee for going over your limit unless you specifically ask for permission to do so and agree to the fee. Discover and American Express have responded by changing their system so that if you try to go over your limit, the transaction is either declined, or accepted with no fee. (They didn't want to go through the hassle of implementing a system whereby one could request permission and agree to a fee.)

I completely fail to see how this is a diminishment of my rights (even taking "rights" in a pretty loose sense). I never actually thought I had the "right" to go over my limit; I thought it was basically a screw-up when it happened, and then I would be penalized. I mean, it's the same thing (in my mind) as overdrawing your bank account - it can happen, but it's not something you're really "allowed" to do, hence the penalty.

I certainly prefer that the transaction is either declined, or accepted with no additional fee.

Are there people who viewed the ability to go over their credit limit in return for paying a penalty as a good thing, a service they enjoyed using?

Praxis II Mathematics Subject Exam

If I decide to try to get alternative certification as a teacher, I will most likely need to take the Praxis II Mathematics subject exam, which is another one by ETS (like the SAT, GRE, etc.) Some states (like Texas) don't take this, and some states (like Colorado) take either this or their own in-state exam, but many states do take the Praxis.

So, out of curiosity, I downloaded a complete sample exam and took it. It is on paper (it's not one of those computer-based tests), 50 questions long, and you have two hours for it.

I won't say that it was trivial. You do need to know math in order to do well on it - at least high school math, and some college math to seal the deal. (I think I actually could have passed this when I graduated from high school, but most people wouldn't.)

I finished with about 20 minutes to spare and got 46 of the questions right, for an adjusted score of 184 (out of roughly 200). I would need a 156, which on this test corresponded to getting 32 questions right, to meet Colorado standards.

So I do feel confident that I can pass this exam without any additional study.

Is Mint.com Safe?

Yesterday, I wrote about managing my money with Mint.com. Ed asked, in a comment, whether Mint.com can be trusted - is it safe to use the service? Here are my thoughts on that question.

Here is the information I have given Mint:

• my email address
• the names of financial institutions I have relationships with
• the user logins and passwords for those accounts

I have not given Mint, and they have not asked for:

• my name
• my address
• my phone number
• my account numbers
• my social security number

Something important to know is that you can't do anything from the Mint.com website. If someone guesses or otherwise obtains my password and logs in as me, they will be able to see a lot of my private financial information, but they won't be able to withdraw money, move money around, view my login and password information for other sites, or anything like that. All they can do to me is violate my privacy a bit. That doesn't seem very interesting for criminals, and I'm not too worried if someone I know does this. (It's just not that private to me that I have $1200 in a savings account or spent $4.62 at McDonald's last week.)

The only real point of danger I see here is that Mint itself has my user names, passwords, security question answers, etc., stored somewhere. This leads to two question:

1. Is Mint a criminal enterprise?

I would say not. They are so mainstream, have so many reviews from mainstream sites, so many certificates from ratings authorities, that I think we would know by now if they were criminals out to steal our money.

2. Can Mint keep my data safe from other criminals?

By this I mean, is Mint going to be hacked into by someone who will then get all of my user names and passwords and use these for nefarious purposes?

I have reasonably good faith that Mint has adequate security meaures in place to prevent this. I also know that anything you can do through accessing my online accounts takes a few days to actually generate money. (For instance, you could have a card issued to yourself from one of my credit accounts, or set yourself up as a bill pay payee and send yourself a payment, or copy the information from one of my scanned-in checks and use the account and routing number to submit your own check from my account to yourself.) I think that if a major breach happened at Mint, they would know, and enough people would be affected that we'd all know to take steps to prevent a loss.

Ultimately, whether you decide to trust systems like this is a personal question. I (briefly) lost $1300 once when someone broke into my Paypal account, but I was able to recover the money within a few days, and the hassle involved was small. Apparently some people have suffered identity theft crimes that were harder to recover from.

At the same time, using Mint makes me much more likely to notice fraud happening in any of my accounts, because it won't take a billing cycle or two to notice new charges show up on a credit card I don't use, or to spot a suspicious withdrawal from my savings account.

My guess is that, on net, using Mint is safer than not using it.

Stupid Health Care Tricks

As of my recent doctor visit, I am taking ranitidine (aka Zantac) to manage my heartburn. I was given a prescription for this, although it is also available over-the-counter. My prescription is for 2 pills a day, or 60 a month.

I find prescriptions kind of a pain in the ass, what with the need to renew them and everything, so as I went to the store I thought I would probably just buy them over the counter. What I found was that a 24-pack (12 day supply, in other words) of generic ranitidine was something like $6 on sale. I knew my co-pay for prescription drugs was something like $10, so I went ahead and filled the prescription.

It turns out that ranitidine is one of my pharmacy's low-cost drugs, so the entire month's supply - 60 pills, or $15 worth of OTC stuff, was $4. That wasn't dependent on my insurance, it was just the pharmacy's price.

I have seen this before, where, either because of insurance or just in general, you can get prescription drugs more cheaply than the same drugs over-the-counter.

One of the things I dislike about the way that health care works in America is that, if you don't have health insurance, you end up paying more for things, and not just in the obvious way. For instance, my doctor's fee is something like $135 for an office visit, but my insurance pays her $45. If I were uninsured I'd have to pay the full $135 because I wasn't included in that negotiated rate.

And if I couldn't afford to see a doctor about my heartburn, I'd have to pay almost four times as much for my ranitidine.

This particular thing is one of those situations where each individual component makes sense and seems like a good thing, but the overall effect is somewhat perverse.

Mint.com

I've recently been experimenting with managing my accounts using Mint.com, which is free online software for just such a purpose. (They support themselves by giving you credit card, savings account, brokerage firm, etc., offers based on your particulars, under one portion of the website.) Prior to this, I've been managing some of my accounts in Excel, and some not at all.

Mint.com will automatically pull information from your checking, savings, investment, credit card, and loan acounts. (It probably doesn't work for every obscure bank and credit union, but it worked for almost all of mine. One of my 401K's that is managed through an old employer's own website did not work.) You can also enter other financially relevant things like the value of your home (which it will automatically get from some other site, if you want, once you give it the address) or car.

Once you get all of your accounts put in, the overview screen looks like this:


(You can probably get a bigger image by clicking. Also, I tried to blur particularly private areas.)

That stuff on the right is the budget that I set up. Since not many transactions have gone through for August yet, Mint isn't showing me anything about how my budget is going. So far.

The "Transactions" tab will give you output like this, which you can filter by account or in various other ways:


It will attempt to categorize all of your transactions for you. You can add new categories if you want, and you can also tell it to ignore certain transactions (not sure why you would do this) or to consistently rename and recategorize some. (For instance, Mint originally guessed that my monthly payment to Amica was for some kind of financial service, but now it knows it is for car insurance.)

Then you can pull up graphs of what you spend money on. This is what my graph for last month looks like. (The "Shopping" category makes it not totally useful; I've been using cash for most things, and this is how I categorized my ATM withdrawals.)

If I click on the blue segment that represents Food & Dining, I get this sub-chart:

and if I click on the green Restaurants segment, I can see exactly where I went:

The site has a lot of other features as well, like charts for showing me how the various investments in my 401K plans are doing, comparisons of my spending to that of other Mint customers, and so on. Which of these are the most useful (or useful at all besides as a way to waste time at work), time will tell. But I'm enjoying it so far, and hoping it simplifies my financial life a bit.

Life Is...Hard?

I have to admit, I am kind of hating my life right now. I might even be a wee bit depressed.

If I tell you what is wrong, odds are that my life might end. Sally might actually fly up here just to kick my ass. (I'm sure she doesn't want to have to do that, but she would, and she'd enjoy it.)

But basically I am bored.

Without school and without having a roommate like Mosch who actually wants to do things (Ed basically keeps to himself most of the time), I don't have anything to structure my free time around. And just working full time, at a job 8 minutes from my apartment, is not enough to fill my time.

Of course, there are plenty of things I should be doing. I should clean the kitchen more. There are a ton of chores that need doing, actually. I should cook healthy meals. And I could study my textbooks for next semester, or go through the GRE Math Subject exam book that I have, or...well, there are so many things. But without a sense of urgency it is hard for me to do any of that stuff. And I just feel very blah.

I am kind of in that rut of feeling that I have nothing to do, yet being unwilling to do any of the things I could do. I am kind of just being a screw-up. And I don't want to develop any new hobbies, because school starts in two weeks (yay) and then I won't have time to do anything at all.

Is it a bad sign that I can't entertain myself for an entire summer? (I'm thinking yes.)

Goodbye Grainless

Well, my magical grainless diet worked...for a few weeks. Now I can't get myself to get back on it. And, what's more, I'm distinctly eating worse than before the grainless diet. I'm obsessing over food a lot (even though I'm eating plenty) and often eating completely unnecessarily, which I wasn't doing (much) before trying the grainless diet.

I feel like dieting is just a generally doomed enterprise, to the extent that we mean anything other than "trying to keep a general focus on eating in a healthy way."

Trying to force myself to eat a particular way or amount just seems to drive me bonkers and make me obsess about food continually.

Not trying to force myself to eat a particular way or amount seems to lead to weight gain.

Obviously I should change my environment. Unfortunately, I think moving to the 19th century would probably shorten my lifespan more than it would lengthen it.

Bonsai!

On Facebook I keep seeing ads for Bonsai, a company that apparently makes "high-quality" sheepskin-lined flip-flops, which they promise will "keep your feet warm in winter and cool in summer."

I don't know where these people are spending their winters, but I'm reasonably certain that merely standing on sheepskin is not enough to keep your feet anything like warm here in Colorado. Maybe on a nippy summer evening these would be nice, but that's about it.

I guess these sheepskin-lined monstrosities solve the problem that causes people to wear sandals with socks - wanting that little bit of extra warmth without having to go so far as wearing a real shoe. You can't wear socks with flip-flops, so you get sheepskin instead.

I am not a shoe snob like Sally and I don't mind seeing people's toes or anything, but I have to admit I am a little bit surprised how widespread flip-flops have become as all-occasion shoes. When I was a kid I think we only wore them to the pool or beach, and now you see them absolutely everywhere.

A Slight Disadvantage of the Facebook Era

They're really going to have to stop using your mother's maiden name as a security measure for accounts.

Being Out of Debt

For something that has almost no impact on my everyday life, it's amazing how much effect being out of debt has on me. I finally, just last month, paid off the very last dribs of credit card debt (the last bit of which was left over from when I switched back to paying cash for everything rather than using a credit card and paying it off monthly), so I owe nothing to anyone.

On a very concrete level, this has no impact. I am able to buy almost exactly as much stuff as before - which is to say, not a house, but a car or anything else I decide to go into debt for. I am not suddenly spending the hundreds of dollars I was sending to debtors every month - it's mostly going into savings (which is a real thing, but doesn't "do" anything until I spend it someday).

But the psychological relief is amazing. I worked on this for so many years, very consistently even if not always very effectively. And now...I'm done. Instead of debt I have a few thousand dollars* in the bank.

Way to go, me.

(* This is actually a slight exaggeration, but not for long.)

How Is Kaiser Permanente Not Like Walmart?

Timothy Noah has an article in Slate today about health care reform, in which he laments the fact that, according to a recent poll, Americans are more afraid of the government having a larger role in determing what medical treatments people receive than they are of the role played by insurance companies. He writes:

The discouraging finding concerns a question that [the Kaiser Family Foundation] doesn't appear to have asked in previous polls. In his July 22 press conference on health reform, President Obama parried a question about the prospect that the government would ration health care by saying:

[T]he government already is making some of these decisions. More importantly, insurance companies right now are making those decisions. And part of what we want to do is to make sure that those decisions are being made by doctors and medical experts based on evidence, based on what works. Because that's not how it's working right now.

It's a powerful point: Wouldn't you rather decisions about your medical treatment were made by government-paid medical experts, focused on which treatment may help you get better, than by private insurance companies focused on maximizing corporate profits? Granted, once a treatment is approved, the government would probably pay less for it than a private insurer would. But, ultimately, government is answerable to the public. Insurance companies are answerable to their stockholders.

As often happens when I read Noah on health care reform, I was a bit boggled by this. Let's try a slight substitution:

Wouldn't you rather decisions about what types of cereal are available be made by government-paid consumer research experts, than by private retailers focused on maximizing corporate profits? ... Ultimately the government is answerable to the public. Retailers are answerable to their stockholders.

Now, it is somewhat clear (or so it seems to me) that medicine isn't really acting in the normal market way. This is probably because of the ways it's regulated already (e.g., the way we get insurance through our employers without paying taxes on it). So we can't really just choose a better insurer as freely as we can choose to stop in a different store. And, honestly, I don't want health care to just be a completely free market, because I think that would (overall) be worse instead of better. But it is certainly not obvious (and is quite possibly not true) that having the government decide what you can and can't have is going to be nicer than having a variety of private companies making those same decisions based on a contract between you and them.

Noah concludes with this even more bizarre assertion (emphasis added):

The larger point, though, is that evidence is growing that even the seemingly bumbling intervention by President George W. Bush's treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, helped the United States avert the onset of a second Great Depression. President Obama's maladroit stimulus probably helped, too. The same may be assumed of legislation that would increase government control over medical decisions. If it doesn't help, voters can make their legislators change it. What their legislators can't do is protect them from the rapacity of private health insurers should no health reform be enacted.

I guess we may assume, then, that any and all government intervention will "probably help," since growing evidence suggests that the bumbling and maladroit stimulus bills did. Perhaps the government really should step in and take care of that breakfast cereal issue. After all, if it doesn't help, we can make legislators change it, while what the legislators can't do is protect us from the rapacity of, well, Walmart.

Buying to Last?

Ellen Ruppel Shell has a small article in the Atlantic ("Buy to Last") arguing that, rather than buying cheaply-made products from Ikea (much less, one presumes, Walmart), we should be buying well-made items that we intend to keep. Some of her argument is about specific Ikea practices, which I won't address here (we don't even have a local Ikea), but I'm interested in the general idea of buying good things.

Let's talk about bookcases. I bought mine a few years ago, and they are pretty much the cheapest kind you can get - tall white particleboard ones that were, I think, something like $30 each. I like how they look, but they are definitely not made to last, and if I move often, eventually they will become casualties. (In the meantime, just sitting there, they seem to hold up fine. It's not as though bookcases see a lot of wear and tear in ordinary life. I don't even dust!)

I could have spent a few hundred dollars each and gotten bookcases made of solid wood, or I could spend even more and get glass or steel ones. Or I could do something like elfa shelving that I would install in the wall, with high-quality components that I could reuse wherever I went. I think metal or solid wood bookcases would be the most likely to last, and I could treat these as important pieces that I would keep forever.

But I'm just not sure this comes out as more environmentally sound. For one thing, particleboard is basically made of sawdust or something anyway. Perhaps it's environmentally horrible to produce - I don't know - but I don't think old growth forests are cut down to make it. And it seems to last an awfully long time despite being basically crappy. I'm not replacing my bookcases every five or even, I suspect, every ten years.

In the meantime, if I bought a nice solid wood bookcase, I might still need to replace or discard it (if I move overseas or it doesn't match my other tasteful pieces or I go completely electronic on books). Yes, in theory it lasts forever and someone else could have it and keep it, but I'm not going to spend thousands of dollars on something so nice that nobody would dare throw it away.

My general strategy for most household items is that I buy things that are pretty cheap (or use whatever I already have, like my mother's small teak dining table that she bought around 1988) and then just keep them anyway.

I guess I worry a bit that even if the "buy something nice to keep forever" idea is actually better for something like bookcases or bedsteads, it will kind of spread over my entire life to where it is just a waste of money. Corelle dishes are (reasonably) cheap, my silverware from Ikea was cheap, and towels from Walmart are cheap, and all of these things last about as long as more expensive things. (In fact I'm sure Corelle dishes outlast more expensive china since they don't break very easily.) And I don't imagine these things are more environmentally costful than their expensive counterparts, either.

I feel like the idea of buying something nice to last instead of "being part of our throw-away consumer culture" is sometimes just an excuse for spending a lot of money on something fancy or extra-tasteful. Outside of outright disposable items, are there items that need to be expensive, hand-crafted, or made of the best materials in order to last for a long time?

Madame Bovary vs. Anna Karenina - More Thoughts

I've now finished reading Madame Bovary. I enjoyed it reasonably well. I now can't remember the tone of Anna Karenina as well, so comparing the actual writing in the two books is difficult. There are obvious plot parallels between the books, at least if we only look at the stories of the title characters (AK has more different plot lines).

An obvious plot difference is that the people in AK are of a much higher social stratum. Both books deal with money issues, but very differently. People like the Bovaries are basically invisible in AK, which deals with aristocracy (close up) and peasants (as accessories).

But I guess the biggest difference, for me, is sort of like the difference between where I work now and my old job - the people in Anna Karenina are smart! Anna herself is actually an intelligent, strong woman. (She reminded me of Sally in some parts.) Emma Bovary is...well, not necessarily completely stupid, but definitely weak.

When you read Madame Bovary, it's a bit like watching a horror movie - you want to yell at the characters about the stupid things they are doing. And, of course, you are forced to listen to a lot of rather idiotic dialogue. (I could have done without Homais the Chemist entirely.)

The characters in Anna Karenina are mostly smart and strong, so the things they do fall more easily along a kind of intellectual or moral axis. You watch them make choices that are more moral in nature. And the non-plot conversations in the book are far, far more interesting. Tolstoy seems to actually respect most of the characters, where Flaubert was obviously making fun of many of his.

I wouldn't really tell someone to go read Madame Bovary for fun, though I didn't hate it or anything. I still recommend Anna Karenina to all but the most determined haters of the (broadly-defined) genre.

Stupid Consultant Tricks

A couple of weeks ago, I finished up the beta version of a data importer that a client (the representative of whom I'll call "Rick") had asked for. Specifically, he wanted a way to automate monthly well production and test data imports from their oilfield management software into their reserves database for Aries (the economics software we use). Rick asked "Jim" (one of the engineers I work for) if we could whip something like this up for them, and Jim asked me, because he knows I can do tricky technical/coding things.

It was a pretty fun project. They sent us sample data in Excel, and I learned enough VBA to write a nice little program in Access. Basically, you click a button to start the import, and it asks you where the Excel file is, sucks the data in, determines what data is duplicate and what data is new, asks you if you want to update existing records, then if you want to add new records, does all of those things, and outputs a form of log letting you know exactly what was done.

Unfortunately, after Rick (the client) had a chance to play with what we sent him, he sent Jim this email:

Looking back on our initial email, I thought we were looking at a loading process from our production database into the Aries database. Both are in Access so it would seem that there should be a way to link the tables with some type of load query. Your current load process is workable for other areas but it would be a huge benefit if the we could do this loading internally within Access.

Apparently what he had wanted was an import from one Access database to another, not from Excel into Access. Although this is not a gigantic change, and is in some ways easier to code, it wasn't what I thought we were doing.

And at first I felt quite annoyed with Rick. Why the hell would you send sample data in Excel if you weren't intending to import the data from Excel? I mean, I worked with what I was given. Stupid client!

But, no. This is actually my fault. I mean, I have most of an entire degree in software engineering. I know better than to just go off half-cocked and write a bunch of code without doing even a minimal amount of requirements engineering. (It's probably not appropriate to write up an entire set of requirements for this project, but a simple email to the client clarifying his needs would have been prudent.) It is not the client's job to know how to unambiguously ask for what he wants.

Stupid consultant! ;-)

Stereograms

A stereogram is (roughly speaking) a pair of pictures (or sometimes just one picture) designed to create a 3D image, and I find I really enjoy just about every form of this art.

The humble View-Master is probably the most well-known type of stereogram. I sometimes had one of these as a kid, usually with reels of scenes from Disney movies or something, but the art form has been around a long time and you can find reels of wildlife, architecture, or even street shots of 1920's Germany. (I have reels like this at home in my small collection. If I could ever find a batch of like 1000 View-Master reels I would totally buy it up.)

Stereograms are also often used in remote sensing, with aerial photography. In this case, two photographs captured by an airplane in two different positions, with around 60% overlap, give you a 3D view of the ground, with significant vertical exaggeration (because the images were taken usually hundreds or thousands of feet apart, while your eyes are only a few centimeters apart). I have this book at home, with images like this:


These are typically viewed using a viewer that is basically just two (magnifying) lenses separated by some plastic, to help each eye look at the correct image. But if you are talented and practice, you can see these with the naked eye. (If you try this with the one above, try making it very level to your eyes and getting your face pretty close to the monitor - the image is a bit small for ideal viewing.)

The technique for viewing a stereogram without a viewer is to learn how to make yourself go "wall-eyed" (the opposite of cross-eyed) while maintaining your eyes' focus. In other words, you need to direct the angle of your eyes as though you are looking at something further away than the actual image, while maintaining the actual focus on the image. I am pretty good at it, and for me, the 3D usually comes before the focus, so I first diverge my eyes, then once the distance is right, I can focus.

Looking at a 2-image stereogram uses the same skill as looking at an autostereogram, which is what those "magic eye pictures" that used to be so popular in malls are. In an autostereogram, the pattern of dots or other elements is arranged such that your eyes can mistake two separate images for the same image, thus creating the illusion of 3D. I find most of the speckledy ones pretty boring, but some other ones are cool. From the Wikipedia article linked above, I especially liked this one of a chess board:


This one looks pretty much the same in 2D or 3D, though once you get the 3D, you will (through the confusion of your eyes) see more pieces. And of course it will appear to be 3D. This is a pretty easy autostereogram to practice on.

This one is much more difficult, but rather clever:


You can also get the stereo effect staring at something like bathroom tiles. Nothing will pop out, of course (though it would be great fun to tile a bathroom in such a way as to create a 3D image for discovery), but the tiles will shimmer a bit and appear to be at a different distance away than they actually are.

Some people, especially those with a lazy eye or who do not generally have depth perception, cannot make out stereograms. Ed, for instance, gets double images in a View-Master or at a 3D movie, so the odds that he can make out an autostereogram are especially low. For the rest of us it is just a learned skill.

Everything Old Is New Again

When the economy is up, there are always plenty of people out there proclaiming that it will go up forevermore because everything is different now and we'll have continuous growth.

When the economy is down, plenty of people likewise proclaim that it won't turn around because the world situation has structurally changed in ways that will prolong the recession indefinitely. Things will never be the way they used to be.

If you're going to use induction it really, really helps to look more than a few months back. Seriously.

Lunch Math

This morning, I heard a radio ad for Applebee's new "Pick 'N Pair" lunch combos. They said you could choose any two of their (delicious, etc.) soups, salads, sliders, pasta, or sandwiches, starting as low as $5.99. There were, they said, over 75 possible combinations.

Rather than thinking, "Hmm, that sounds good - maybe I should eat lunch at Applebee's," I, being a math geek, thought, "How many items must there be in order for it to be correctly and reasonably described as 'over 75' combinations?"

Starting with the idea that you could choose from the same pool twice, the number of combinations would seem to be some number squared. For instance, if you had 9 choices for the first item, and 9 for the second item, you might think you had 81 possible combinations. Except that order doesn't matter (choosing french onion soup + shrimp salad is the same as choosing shrimp salad + french onion soup). So 9 items would actually give us 45 choices using this model (assuming I'm calculating correctly). And 12 items would give us 78 choices. So perhaps there are 12 different items.

But this assumes you might order the same thing twice - say, two orders of BBQ Pulled Pork sliders. And that doesn't seem likely. If we instead have to choose two different items, again with order not mattering, then it becomes a combination. Here, 13 items would give us 78 choices, which you'd probably describe as "more than 75."

So, with my guess that the menu has 13 choices, I went to look at the actual menu:


It seems to me that there are in fact 14 different items, which means 91 combinations of 2. But you wouldn't describe 91 as "over 75" (although it is, of course).

Perhaps they are thinking that you would order any two items, but not two of the same item, and not two different sliders. In that case, you would take our 91 choices and subtract the 6 that involve two sliders, leaving 85 choices. If you further assume that ordering two soups would be strange, we could subtract those 6 combos as well, leaving 79 choices, which is a reasonable value for "more than 75."

Perhaps the Applebee's folks reasoned this all out. Or maybe the menu originally had 13 items (giving us the straightforward "13 choose 2" calculation of 78), and one was added at the last minute, after they had already designed the ad campaign.

Oh, Yeah. That.

I was sitting here at my desk feeling utterly crappy - tired, spiritless, bored, whiny. I haven't been tired all week, so even though I'm slightly underslept, there's no reason I should be that tired now. I was just kind of disgruntled all over.

Oh.

Of course.

Our office building had a BBQ lunch for us, and I drank water with it. Not iced tea, like I have every day at lunch. When you're used to being caffeinated in the afternoon, skipping the lunch caffeine is a perfect way to become doldrumated.

I am now reviving myself with a glass of this Elixir of Life.

Grainlessness Update

So, I am still doing the grainless thing, though not with perfect adherence. I've decided to add whole wheat pasta (2 oz. at a time only) as well as brown rice (small quantities, like 3/4 cup) to my diet. And I've been exercising somewhat regularly, though not quite as much as I'd like.

According to the scale at the gym last night, I am down 10 pounds from where I started in early June. I was only wearing my bathing suit (and Crocs) when I weighed myself, which may be less than I generally wear, but I was dripping wet from my shower (I hadn't dried off at all since I was headed straight for the pool anyway), so that may have balanced it out.

Despite having lost 10 pounds, I feel unsure that this way of eating/living is actually going to result in a lot of weight loss. I don't know why that is, except that weight loss is generally slow if you're doing it the way I do, and so it's hard to be sure you're really seeing a trend and not random fluctuations.

But I'm feeling really, really good about it. For the first time pretty much ever, it's crystal clear to me that I feel better when eating this way than I do when I overeat (especially in an unplanned way). I feel kind of strong and good inside. I hope that it lasts. I am really trying to think of this as a lifestyle change and not a diet to lose weight, so...well, we'll see.

Oh, Pandora, You Kidder

Before the song even started, I saw in my Pandora window the following album cover.


Oh my goodness. Not a good sign, and yet it perfectly captures a certain aesthetic, doesn't it? Don't you just know what the music will sound like? It was "Heat of the Moment":



And we get even more dragons!

Economic Cycles

This series of charts in the New York Times was pretty interesting.

Tennis Lesson

Ed and I are currently taking tennis lessons through the City of Lakewood. Our class has been really small - the highest number of people was four, and that was on the first night; since then there have only been three of us.

Last Wednesday, Ed worked late, and I was the only one at class. So I basically got a private lesson for 50 minutes, which was awesome and also exhausting.

The tennis teacher kind of takes an iterative approach to improving us, which I really appreciate. As an example, this is how he improved my serve.

First, he had me do a few serves. Most of them went in, which is generally about the best thing you can say about my serve - it does go in. I stand sideways to the court (like you're supposed to) and start with my racquet over my shoulder and sideways to my back - like I'm scratching my back with it. (This eliminates having to do the back swing - you just come forward with the racket instead.) Then I toss the ball up and hit it (duh).

After he watched me serve 5 or 6 balls, he said, "Now I want you to toss the ball higher." So I tried that, and he kept pushing me on it, for perhaps 10 more serves.

"OK," he said. "Now I want you to follow through with the racquet to under your left arm." He demonstrated, and I tried to replicate the motion a few times without actually serving. Then I served balls that way, at first not getting them in (and thwacking myself once), but then learning to get them in with this new style. I did notice, once they started going in, that they were indeed better serves.

So after maybe 15 of these serves, he said, "All right. Now I want you to lean into the court when you do it."

I added that to my serve, hit about 10 more balls, and we were done with serving. I think my serve got much better over just this ~ 10 minutes (if that) of instruction, and without my having to be overwhelmed by 20 different new ideas all at once.

(In the picture above, you will note that Goofy has mastered a skill I have not - stepping with the correct foot for a volley.)

Selling a Lifestyle

Brooks Brothers ads (which I see online often) really hit me with their lifestyle-selling - more so than other ads, although I realize many do this. Here is an example I got from the Washington Post website.

You are rich. You don't just live in a house, but rather you have a compound of buildings all in the classical style. Your yard is perfectly manicured, with a pool. Most of your days are spent taking your adorable, tow-headed children with you to pleasant garden parties and other outings. Perhaps croquet or badminton is to be played on the lawn.

One way you can tell the people are upper class (as though there weren't plenty) is that the men are wearing somewhat girlish colors (yellow, baby blue, lavender). This is a kind of upper crust privilege; regular men of the proletariat wear much more macho tones.

The pair on the left are clearly a couple. The woman on the left may be a bit more youthful and free-spirited than the one on the right; we can tell because she has gone out with her head uncovered. Is the woman on the right married to the slightly elderly gentleman? Perhaps she is a youthful grandmother to the two boys. Or perhaps she is the gentleman's daughter, and her husband is out practicing his remunerative but respectable profession.

Should I Be Worried?

This morning, when I woke up, Ed was right outside my bedroom door.

"I was just dreaming about you," I said.

"Me too!" he said.

In my dream, Ed and I were taking some kind of calculus class together. I didn't understand the material presented on the first day - I was missing some background - but I intended to research it once I got home. I knew that Ed would be happy to help me with it, but the thought was intolerable. As I was walking out of class, I was thinking about how he would say, "I can think of nothing I'd rather do than teach you this stuff," and it made me feel deeply annoyed.

In Ed's dream, he was trying to get ready for work, and before he got dressed, a girl from our tennis class came over, and she and I were conspiring to make him late for work. In fact, when he consulted his watch, it was 8:30!

I dream about annoying, unwanted help from Ed. He dreams about being thwarted and having his space invaded.

:-)

Roger Ebert on "Transformers"

Roger Ebert's 1-star review of the new movie "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is a real delight. A couple of excerpts:

"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.

...

The human actors are in a witless sitcom part of the time, and lot of the rest of their time is spent running in slo-mo away from explosions, although--hello!--you can't outrun an explosion. They also make speeches like this one by John Turturro: "Oh, no! The machine is buried in the pyramid! If they turn it on, it will destroy the sun! Not on my watch!" The humans, including lots of U.S. troops, shoot at the Transformers a lot, although never in the history of science fiction has an alien been harmed by gunfire.

Go read the whole thing.

Mathematician's Lament

I really enjoyed this, and I think you will too:

A Mathematician's Lament

Read whether you love or hate math.

The Dysfunctional Company

Every time I get a new job, I start off with a very happy view of the new company. Internal divisions and politics are invisible to me, I am not aware of any possible mistakes that the company may be making, and the place just appears to me as a companionable group of people all striving towards a common purpose.

People are not eager to disabuse you of these notions either. They don't know you yet, so they won't complain about other people to you, or about the company itself. They're certainly not going to harsh your new job buzz by telling you the whole thing's going into the crapper because management can't tell its ass from a hole in the ground.

Over time, you slowly learn. So-and-so is an incompetent bully. Promotions haven't been decided fairly. Department Y is a bunch of morons. The CFO is an alcoholic. The last few announcements by management turned out to be morale-destroying lies.

(None of this is true of my current company, incidentally. I wouldn't dare blog about the things that are actually true.)

This disillusionment phase is always a little bit hard on me. I want to know the gossip and news, but part of me also wants to retain my state of innocence. I like believing that I'm working for a really functional, good company without any fatal flaws.

But it occurs to me that companies are actually just like people. If a person isn't obviously dysfunctional or grossly flawed, you will still learn, if you get to know them well enough, that they have deep flaws or dysfunctions of some kind. Often there are obvious ways you can imagine them optimizing their behavior, but which they are unwilling or unable to adopt. Sometimes these prove to be intolerable, but usually they just go into the overall balance of your feelings about the person (and can even endear them to you).

Why should a company be any different?

Metaphor and Mapping

If you look at the longitude and latitude lines on a globe, you may notice (if you haven't in the past) something interesting: we don't handle north-south and east-west the same way.The longitude lines are great circles that meet at the north and south poles, while the latitude lines are just horizontal (if you will) circles of varying size, like cross-sections of the planet.

I commented to Ed recently that we should try doing east-west like we do north-south, and he said, "But then, if you went east for a while, you'd eventually be going west."

"What?" I asked.

"Well, now, if you go north far enough, then eventually you start going south, so if we handled east-west the same way..."

And that was a very weird thought. At first I couldn't make any sense of the idea that if you go east for a while you'll find yourself heading west (because it's not true), and then I started wondering why it does seem to make sense for north-south. Why am I comfortable with the idea that once you're at the north pole, if you keep going, you're heading south?

Is it purely because I was educated about how latitude/longitude lines work?

Then it occurred to me that it's because I think of the north pole as "up" (the way that north is up on most maps). And so I associate it metaphorically with the direction that heads away from gravity. And clearly if you were to climb up a sphere for long enough (using your sticky gecko feet), you'd get to the top, and if you kept going, you'd be headed back down. While if you just geckoed your way sideways around the sphere, there wouldn't be any reversals.

Is it natural that we think of north as up, or is it just a convention? Clearly it's a matter of convention whether north or south is up, but could east or west be up just as easily? We would then picture the earth as rolling around through its orbit rather than spinning, and we would view the solar system as being a flat vertical plane rather than a horizontal platter.

What do you think?

The Real Purpose of Neosporin

Last night, while cutting up some peppers, I sliced a bit of the end of my thumb off (just the skin). Trying not to drip all over everything, I had Ed apply a bandaid (feeling grateful, once again, that we have the nice fingertip kind that are shaped well for just such a purpose). It was partly successful at containing the mess.

This morning, I went to change the bandage. I was completely unable to remove the portion of the bandaid that was on the actual wound. I tried soaking my thumb in a cup of warm water for about half an hour (seriously) and it still wouldn't come off. It was too painful for me to pull it off and I didn't really want to start it leaking again.

Yes, I am the biggest wimp ever.

So I went to a clinic today to say, basically, "What the hell should I do with this thing?" In the meantime, I had cut away all of the old bandaid that I could, and put a new one on top of it.

It turns out it is important not to let a bandaid become a permanent part of your body (who knew) so the doctor took it off (almost painlessly somehow, though it did reopen the wound), had me soak my thumb for 10 minutes in lidocaine, and then had a nurse clean it up and dress it with some neosporin and a new bandage.

I feel I now know the real point of neosporin - to keep your bandaid from sticking. Duh.

New Blog, Extra Boring

I've decided to try keeping a food and exercise diary in the form of a blog. If you like to read it, it is here:

Fuel and Motion

I imagine it will be fairly boring, so (obviously, as though you wouldn't anyway) feel free to skip it.

The Sally Series!

My professor for Advanced Calculus next semester emailed us the name of the book we're using for the class, so I was able to order it. It came today.

Imagine how pleased I was when I saw a logo in the corner letting me know that it is part of the Sally Series. Apparently this one is Book 5.


Now I want to collect the whole set just for the name.

Simple?

Every time I see this advertisement I am attracted to it:

...and then I go look at their offerings.

And I think, really? Simple? Less > More? That goes with paying $55-60 for a pair of sneakers? For real?

I guess it is "less > more" in the sense of "I will be rich in this way of paying a lot for a few nicer items rather than having a lot of junk." But that's not really what I think of as simple. I think of simple (in the positive sense) as meaning that you don't obsess over the brand of your tennis shoes.

I'm glad they make the planet happy, though.

An Amusing Smackdown

I came across this bit of advice from a Carolyn Hax live advice discussion:

Bethesda, MD: What's the best way to deal with a supervisor who has inane policies about attendance? I'm a good employee, but I have a tendency to come in 15 or so minutes late, and if I do, my supervisor takes away vacation time. It's not like I have to be at work to answer phones or because someone's expecting me -- my work is almost totally independent. I do end up putting in an eight hour day (I'll stay late when I come late), but my supervisor has said that she doesn't want me to do that. These policies make no sense and only serve to lower the morale of the workplace. Short of quitting, is there anything I can do? She's totally inflexible about this, and talking to her does no good.

Carolyn Hax: Show up on time.

Love that.

The End of Overeating

I've finished David Kessler's book "The End of Overeating." It was a pretty short and easy read, and aside from a bit of annoyance over a misdefinition of "heritability", I don't have much to say against it. I guess I'm not sure whether his ideas justified an entire book, as opposed to perhaps a long magazine article.

I did get something new out of it. I had already believed that people are getting fatter because we live in this environment that is full of food engineered to be as delicious as possible that can be obtained and consumed 24/7. I think that's kind of a no-brainer if you have thought about the issue at all. Part of this is the market at work - companies have been motivated to learn how to make tastier and tastier food, while our health is none of their concern - and part is a change in social mores such that snacking anytime, any place no longer seems gauche or inappropriate. (According to Kessler, snacks in America used to be something only children got. And in France, people still don't eat outside of mealtimes.)

But what I hadn't really "gotten" before - although I'd thought of it obliquely from time to time - is the way that these "hyper-palatable" foods act sort of like drugs in setting up a cue/reward/craving cycle. Instead of having a normal relationship to food, a lot of us think about some of our favorite foods all the time, and obsess over them. Plain, enjoyable foods don't trigger these kinds of responses, but the kind of layered/loaded extravaganza foods that are marketed to us do.

I remember as a kid, I used to fantasize about everyone else disappearing from the world. I still think about that sometimes, but as a kid, the first thing I did in this fantasy was go to McDonald's and eat all the french fries I wanted.

On vacations, I am always really interested in what we're going to eat for meals. It's probably the most interesting aspect of most vacations for me.

I moved away from Houston almost 9 years ago and I still obsess over some of the restaurants there.

These are not healthy ways to feel about food. After all, I live in an environment of plenty, and unless the world changes, I should never be threatened with starvation. (Even if my life radically changes for the worse, there are food stamps, food banks, etc., to help me out.) I don't obsess over air or water, so why should I obsess over food?

Kessler doesn't really recommend a "diet" per se (in fact, like most sensible folks, he's into the idea that you're changing your habits forever, not going on some kind of "plan" of limited duration), but the last parts of the book do have recommendations about how to eat better and (possibly) overcome what he calls "conditioned hypereating."

His recommendations aren't very systematic, but they boil down to strictly avoiding hyper-palatable foods (at least while you get them under control), finding healthy foods that are satisfying and enjoyable in appropriate quantities, using rules/planning to guide your eating, not engaging in will power struggles over food with yourself (i.e., using rules to avoid the "I want that / I shouldn't eat that / But I want it / But that's bad" type of inner dialogue), and developing negative attitudes towards hyper-palatable foods (viewing them as the enemy and something you're tricked into wanting, similar to how our view of cigarettes has changed).

I found the advice realistic...maybe too realistic. It did instill the good idea of mentally focusing on changing my relationship to food in this way that would be very positive, but it basically made me feel much more pessimistic about being able to do it. When I finished the book I was pretty much ready to give up on the whole thing and just be fat and food-obsessed instead.

Anyway, I'm basically in favor of the book - I think it raises important issues and has basically sound advice about them. And it was interesting to read.

A Bit Ambiguous

I did a double-take at the first sentence of this Denver Post article:

A Thornton restaurateur who served Peking duck to President George W. Bush — along with several Democratic and Republican politicos — could serve 20 years in federal prison on a charge of laundering money connected to a marijuana distribution ring.

Wait - several Democratic and Republican politicos were involved in a marijuana distribution ring?

Oh, no, they just ate Peking duck. Well that's better.

David Kessler in Salon

Salon has an interview with David Kessler, former head of the FDA, about his new book "The End of Overeating." He talks in the interview about what (in his view) causes people to overeat, which is basically just conditioning based on our experiences of eating rich food. For instance, he says,

In people who have a hard time controlling their eating, their brain circuits remain elevated and activated until all the food is gone. Then the next time you get cued, you do it again. Every time you engage in this cycle you strengthen the neural circuits. The anticipation gets strengthened. It's in part because of ambivalence. Do you ever have an internal dialogue? "Boy, that would taste great. No, I shouldn't have it. I really want that. And I shouldn't do it."

That sort of ambivalence increases the reward value of the food. It increases the anxiety, it increases the arousal, it keeps it in working memory. We're wired to focus on the most salient stimuli in our environment. For some people it could be alcohol or illegal drugs or nicotine or sex or gambling. For many of us it's food.

He seems to be at least a partial advocate of rules-based eating:

The question is, how have [some people] stayed lean? For many of them the fact is, they're in torment. It's a constant struggle. Others have laid down new learning, and that's made it easier. They develop rules for themselves that they follow. Then, you're not constantly eating in a chaotic, disorganized way. You're not constantly being cued. Your brain's not being constantly activated. But those rules have to be unambiguous, and they're not easy to follow.

In the end, they have what's called a critical perceptual shift. They look at food differently. How do you really cool a stimulus? How do you decrease the anticipation of the food, the power of the food to activate, to grab attention? The answer to that is you view the stimulus differently.

And:

Some people -- and I'm not advocating it -- become vegetarian. That makes it easier. They look at animal fats and proteins and say, "I don't want that." Some people look at food and say, "That's highly processed, I don't want that. I want real food." Some people look at large portions and say, "I don't want that, that looks disgusting."

I find that my no-grains diet is working pretty beautifully. I'm not sure yet whether it will have the desired results (weight loss), but it's definitely making controlling my eating pretty easy. Aside from occasional, brief, intense cravings, I'm not finding it difficult not to eat grains or potatoes. I just don't eat them. There's no wiggle room, no way to start eating the plate of fries Kessler talks about, and so no problem not eating the entire plateful.

My current "rule" is that I can eat grains/starches reasonably freely for one meal per week, I can eat them if no other food is available and I need to eat (which may come into play when, for instance, I visit my vegetarian relatives, who always cook at home), and on geniune special occasions (like cake at a birthday party). "I especially want french fries right now" is not a special occasion.

Anyway, in the usual way that people enjoy information that confirms what they already thought or were doing, I enjoyed the interview.

Madame Bovary vs. Anna Karenina

After Sally mentioned being disappointed by Madame Bovary (which I had mentioned in connection with Anna Karenina), I decided to read it again. I read it in high school - 10th or 11th grade - but I didn't remember much except that it was about an adulterous wife. (I hope that's not a spoiler for anyone.)

I haven't finished the book yet - in fact, I haven't gotten to any adultery yet - but it's amazingly different from Anna Karenina. They were published about 25 years apart, and I'm curious if the differences are about changes that happened over that time period or differences between French and Russian culture, or just differences between the authors themselves and their styles.

The difference is hard to characterize. If I'd read MB before AK, I think I would have found it very normal for what it was, and exactly as expected. But having read AK, I'm finding it more difficult to get through. (Let me say explicitly what should be obvious - the books are similar enough in some sense that comparing them makes sense.)

When you read AK, it feels like you really get, on a true psychological level, what is going on with the characters, like you are right in with them. With MB, it's more like looking at a diorama - everything is removed, small, somewhat intricately described but without real "life" to it. Or like the story is wrapped in several layers of tissue paper.

Anna Karenina is just so much more...modern.

Boooooooks

I hope you hear that title in a zombie voice.

I'm running out of books that I know I want to read, and it seems all I do is read recently, so I need recommendations, please. I'm partial to fiction but also enjoy non-fiction, especially social sciences. I don't generally enjoy mysteries, history (though I readily enjoy books written, or set, in the past), or biography.

Help!

Brr!

I have to admit, I am getting a little sick of this cold chilly weather bullshit we have going on here.

Monday, I wore tennis shoes to work so that I could work out afterwards. I ended up feeling a little odd about walking in a treadmill in my khakis, so I walked in the small park across the street from my building instead (which was nicer anyway, pretty much). But it was so chilly - at 5:30 in the afternoon, people! - that a sweatshirt would have been really nice. It took me a good 10 minutes of walking to warm up enough that I wasn't uncomfortable.

Tuesday night, Ed and I played tennis (first time we have played together! it was a lot of fun) and it was barely warm enough to wear shorts for it. And, of course, that was a very pleasant temperature to play in, but that's as high as it seems to get lately.

Right now it is raining and probably 60 degrees outside.

Meanwhile, here is why Natalie Dee hates people:


nataliedee.com

We had a really warm winter, so I guess this is what we get. But there's a reason I didn't move to Seattle.